Dependency bordering on addiction
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on October 4, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Long ago in an operating system far, far removed from anything we use nowadays, Symantec made a piece of software that generated a severe dependency bordering on addiction. As soon as an unexplained glitch hit, usually QuarkXPress – which is nothing unusual even today – out would come Norton’s Disc Doctor to check for all those “B-Tree errors” and bad “Volume Header Blocks”. And it usually helped. Problems were solved and work resumed. So good was Disc Doctor that it became de rigeur for all Mac troubleshooters to run it before doing anything else.
Then Apple had a change of gear, dumped a decade of work on their new OS and bought in Next Step instead along with with its BSD Unix underpinnings. Symantec, publishers of Norton’s Tools, saw the writing on the wall and ceased production of their Mac version. There just wasn’t any need for their offering because free Unix software does exactly the same job and runs automatically every time the computer starts. Even the disc de-fragmentation utility in Norton’s Tools was rendered obsolete because de-fragging occurs routinely every time a file is opened and saved.
To Symantec’s chagrin, their other Mac offerings were little needed as Unix included a very efficient firewall and the Permissions-led access to the System left only small openings for virus writers to exploit. Besides, the move to Unix made all the free firewalls and anti-virus programs available. McAfee, another publisher of Mac anti-virus software was also left high and dry, especially when Apple themselves dumped McAfee’s Virex and shifted to a free open source scanner called clamXav.
So what did Symantec and McAfee do next? They whinged about their loss of a market and spread FUD about how dangerous it is to practice unsafe computing without one of their prophylactics.
Now wonder then that they are watching Vista with extremely rheumy eyes, moaning that Microsoft is shutting them out of their market place because it won’t give them the API’s they need and is competing with them by supplying it’s own brand of anti-virus. David Sykes, VP of Symantec, is quoted in APC as saying Microsoft is using bully tactics to make implementing third-party antivirus software more difficult. “As a result, computers running Vista will become more vulnerable.” In other words, more FUD.
It is strange, though, that anti-virus software will not be built into Vista, touted as Microsoft’s most secure operating system yet, and instead only be available at extra cost. One wonders whether, if it were up to the anti-virus publishers, Vista would never become secure and attract every computing cough and sniff in the world. But then I’ve always questioned exactly who it is that releases so many diseases in the computer world. Is it really young “hackers” who get a buzz out of writing them? Or should suspicion fall on the firms who generate a large income from preventing the infections in the first place? Maybe just paranoia… but you never know.
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